IBM 'breaks the gigabyte barrier'

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: IBM 'breaks the gigabyte barrier'
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 12:25:23 EST
From: GLIGOR1 () aol com

IBM 'breaks the gigabyte  barrier'
By Chris Nuttallin San  Francisco
Published: March 9 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 9 2006  02:00
_www.ft.com_ (http://www.ft.com)

IBM says it  has achieved a technology breakthrough that will allow massive
computer networks  to share information six times faster than currently
possible.
IBM says the software advance, called Project Fastball, could lead to a
big
leap in the performance of simulation programs, including scientific
applications and interactive online games with tens of thousands of
players. The
company says it has broken the "gigabyte barrier" that has prevented
supercomputers, organised in networks of thousands of parallel
processors and  storage
devices, from feeding data fast enough to the processors.
A speed of 102gb a second was reached on its ASC Purple supercomputer, the
third most powerful in the world, at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory
 in California. The speed is equivalent to downloading 25,000 songs in a
second.
"We applied this to the nuclear [stockpile] safety problem being carried
out
at Lawrence Livermore but this opens the door for other applications,"
said
Chris Maher, director of software development for high performance
computing
at  IBM.
IBM envisages the techniques will be used in tsunami warning devices and
Department of Homeland Security software programs that simulate the
behaviour of
millions of humans responding to threats. Medical systems could analyse
huge
patient databases better as well as CAT scans in more detail. Online
gaming
would become richer and more responsive and there could be true video on
demand,  with television and movies available instantly.
IBM is making the source code of the software available to customers in
the
hope they can spur further innovations. Its Global Parallel File System, as
the  software has been named, is designed to keep up with advances in
supercomputers.  Increases in size and performance have generated huge
stores of data
that need  better software to manage them.


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